Salt Slow

by Julia Armfield

  Mona’s phone rings and rings – she doesn’t answer it, only turning her head as Ava flicks the television onto mute. I heard someone talking yesterday about a fan in Newcastle, Ava says, who brought some knitting to do in the queue before the show. Then later, when she left, she went two streets down to a bar she wasn’t old enough to get into and drove a knitting needle through the bouncer’s eye. Mona shakes her head, mentally replaying her Newcastle footage – the long line of girls in neon trainers, perhaps some overlooked flash of needle points.

  The stories are stranger here, or perhaps they are now simply far enough away from where they started to accept more outlandish versions of things they have heard before. A group of girls are said to have left the show in Hull and chased a forty-year-old man up a pylon. A girl in Nottingham is rumoured to have left the gig after the encore and returned to her mother’s house five hours later, holding something resembling a heart in her sticky fist.

  Ava turns over onto her elbow and moves a hand down Mona’s side, apparently done with talking. Mona allows herself to be pulled down and wrapped around with blankets, though she keeps her eye on the television and the long dark sweep of girls until the news piece is over.

  9.

  Early morning, at a rest stop outside Dublin. The company have disembarked to stretch their legs when Mona, doubling back to grab her wallet, comes just far enough along the aisle to see into the back, for once uncurtained. She can make out little, only Catherine stooped in rubber gloves, gathering up a matted nest of wide black feathers trampled down into the floor.

  10.

  Swansea, rain-glistered. Distracted, Mona picks up her phone without thinking and realises it is her mother too late to disconnect. The voice is flinted with distance, resentfully surprised. I’d got so used to your voicemail. The conversation lasts less than five minutes and holds the unpleasant timbre of a telling-off, though her mother quavers towards the end of certain sentences, as though her conviction is coming loose at one hinge. It was unkind of you just to disappear like that, I don’t care what the job is. I know it’s work but to just up and leave everything – your whole life, with no warning – I’m sorry, I don’t know. It just seemed unfair.

  Afterwards, she walks down to the venue where the road crew are setting up. The queue is already tangled along the side of the building, more unruly than she has ever known it to be. The girls have overspilled the barriers and are pushing forward with unharnessed energy, jagger of voices like a hive held over a flame. The doorman presses a boot against the bottom of the door as it shuts behind her, testing the weight with the hobnailed edge of his heel.

  The band have a live slot booked at a local radio station and the road crew play it over the PA system during set-up. The DJ is a middle-aged man with a drooping accent and a tendency to turn sentences down at the corners. So tell us about your current tour, he asks with an inflection like sending back soup at a restaurant, I hear there’s been some talk about your fans running a little wild – some bad behaviour, stunts out of hand and so on. Don’t you feel that, as public figures – artists – you have some duty to your fans – many of them vulnerable girls – to set an example? There is a crackle – thirteen solid seconds of dead air – before the lead guitarist replies: Setting an example’s all well and good but I personally wouldn’t want the kind of fans who’d follow it. We just want fans who follow us. The DJ seems to encounter some problem with his microphone shortly after that and the band obligingly step in to play an uninterrupted acoustic set that carries them into the four o’clock news.

  11.

  Ava asks if Mona’d like to get a hotel again when they get to Cardiff, sitting idle on the bus with her finger holding down the page of a book. They are all a little weary, undercaffeinated. Two days ago, something had gone wrong with the coffee filter and they had barely realised in time that they’d all been filling up their mugs with blood. Mona drops down into the seat beside Ava, nodding vaguely and taking hold of her free hand. Catherine is walking up and down the aisle, stretching her legs in front of her and groaning as her knees and ankles crack. The lighting techs are playing canasta and drinking ginger beer at the table before the closed black curtain.

  The bus rumbles around them, whirring on towards the next place as Ava reads and twists her fingers through the holes in Mona’s jeans. Mona listens only vaguely, thinking back to her mother’s phone call and wondering at the tone in her voice – tight, as if stretched thinly over something hidden. She tilts her head, trying to focus her mind on the decision she first made to follow the band, to really up and leave and join their crew. She remembers, of course, the first time hearing them, the opening sensation, the lurch. She closes her eyes, recalling the bloody little episode. Years ago, picnic blanket in her father’s garage; the dust and daddy-long-legs and pulling up her shirt as the boy from across the road fiddled with the radio. Something dour and masculine. Listen to this one, and biting her neck so hard her necklace broke and spilled down between them. She had let him roll her over, moaned and writhed the way she knew she should, and then the music had changed to something else, channel changing unbidden to something vampish and inciting – coaxing fingers creeping out from the radio – and something inside her had smarted. Ribs, wrenching open, the sensation of something tugging on her spine, the wrong way, pulling out from the depths of her chest. Pushing him over onto his back, she had moved her hands up over his arms, over his chest and shoulders, coming to rest on his throat where she had fanned her fingers, pressed down until she felt something give. The music had bristled on into a chorus and she had leant forward as though sinking her shoulders into water, feeling the shape of her own mouth – at once soft and vicious, the prelude to a bite.

  She remembers too the lack of afterwards, the nothing space of in between that became each gap between one song and another, each wait between playing a CD and getting to play it again, each year between first hearing them and finally joining them on the road.

  When they arrive, the fans are already there, despite the fact the show is not for seven hours. The venue is ringed with frosted windows and the girls are pressed to the glass in great gangs, choking up the street. A local newspaper, it is soon discovered, has reprinted an old interview with the band as press for their arrival. What are you? the journalist asks at one point, going on to clarify that he just means to enquire what kind of genre they see themselves in: rock, pop, indie, all of the above.

  Much later, Mona is dispatched to the dressing room to fetch the band for soundcheck and briefly catches the lead guitarist without her face on. She has forgotten to knock but thankfully no one sees her pressing the door open; tall sweep of wet black feathers. The face – the brief glimpse that she has of it – is a curious thing, familiar yet misplaced with its upturned nose and silvered eyelids, hanging over the back of a swivel chair.

  12.

  London at last. The driver angles the bus through a road gagged with girls who beat on its sides with the flats of their hands.

  The venue is a large white oval building, a pitted eye lidded with tall gates which the girls try to climb. The crew hide the bus in the back lot out of sight of the road and slump down in their seats, considering. They are all hungry, white-gummed and bloodless. All of the freshly bought food on the bus rotted overnight and Catherine had to scoop it up into a plastic bucket, tipping it over the crash barrier on a layby.

  They do the get-in quietly, a smell like pennies on the backs of their hands. The venue is a five-thousand-seater and the soundboard operator is worried about levels. It won’t reach the back row, people won’t hear them. Catherine shakes her head, still grimy at the fingertips. Never been a problem being heard before. Mona films the setup; the lighting technicians levering themselves up into the rafters like ragged birds with women’s heads. On the stage, the road crew are arguing – a gentle sound, merely drifting. She focuses her lens on Ava, oddly veinless, the thin white lines at her temples.

  There is a chip shop across the
road and they send her out at five o’clock to fetch something resembling supper, passing unnoticed amongst the girls who throng the road. The boy behind the counter can’t be more than eighteen, skin like fork-clawed cottage cheese. He eyes her curiously – the peek of her pass on a chain, tide of travel scum at her jawline – asks if she’s working the venue tonight. Who’s the band, he queries without inflection, and she tells him with a note of pride which crests and breaks against the dam of his indifference. Oh, right, I think my sister likes them. She sets her mouth in a line, pays him without thanks.

  Doors at seven thirty. Mona is sent to film the band walking from their dressing room to the stage. The dressing room – what little she sees of it before the door swings shut – is a dark disaster, blackened stains on unforgiving surfaces. The smell is strong, a rotting like the peeling-off of flesh. In the dark of the wings, she watches the band through her camera display, registering as she does so a sensation quite like love, white-hot, devoid of logic. The lead guitarist grasps the bassist’s hand, the rhythm guitarist pushes her fingers into her temples, holding the corners of something in place. From backstage, Mona films the roar of the crowd as the band passes out onto the stage. A sea of orange shirts and upturned faces, girls crying, already mouthing the words. Behind her in the wings, Ava rests her chin on her shoulder, watches the crowd through the camera display. I love this song, she says, anticipating. They stand there together as the lead guitarist strikes her first chord, both registering the same internal twinge, the vibrant, violent pulling.

  On the news later, a brief video package, girls bursting from the venue and howling across the street. The velvet rage of their small mouths, hair torn from temples. A swollen werewolf moon. Orange T-shirts fraying at the hems, unwound and ragged. In a blurry clip, one can just make out the boy in the chip-shop window, the way he moves his hands up at the breaking of the frontage glass. In a thick swathe, the girls reach out for him, grabbing at his legs and neck and elbows, pulling him out through the window. The clip ends shortly after that, before the screaming and the rending, the camera swinging away to capture the mass of a thousand girls all racing forward down the street, the crooked note of music in the air.

  Granite

  There is no way to love a man. Not well, or rather, not correctly.

  Maggie knows this and loves him anyway – a vast stupidity of love that a part of her views with a painful sort of irony. Of course you love him, you fool, you idiot. What an utterly moronic thing to go and do.

  Her friends are nurses, midwives, physical therapists. They discuss the issue with clinical focus over Chenin blanc and Twiglets. Men, they say, are not built to withstand the same internal pressures. You can see it in their hips, the way they breathe after running. A lack in anatomical endurance. From a purely physical perspective, it is hard to love a man without breaking him apart.

  Her friends have husbands, speak on good authority. She is late to the party, almost thirty years old.

  ‘It’s a design flaw,’ they tell her, refilling her glass, a novice before the collective. ‘Not their fault, exactly. Isn’t to say that you can’t love them, just that you have to be careful doing it.’

  They show her photographs on their phones – smiling men, ordinary in earth-tones and morning suits – the men they have married and branded and kept for themselves. To her eyes, there is nothing obviously wrong with any of them; they all wear logo T-shirts, like to pose next to barbecues, all seem partially blinded by the sun. Her friends, however, tap their screens to zoom in on throats and the corners of eyelids, reminding her that to love a man is to watch him buckle. She comes away drunk and weaving slightly, catching her heels in the down escalator on the Tube. Her friends text her later, to ensure she got home OK, reminding her to be careful how she goes.

  We’re glad you’re happy, Maggie – messages like little stones thrown into water, insincere and easily dismissed.

  +

  He is tall in her tiny kitchen, autumnal in his work clothes. He works in horticulture, designing gardens for historic properties, and his body is a dense, outdoorsy object. Crisp-cold, tang of stone and mineral, the bonfire sweetness when she kisses his cheek.

  She thinks about him all day at work, answering calls with his voice caught up in her intonation. Picking compulsively at her cuticles, doodling his name in the claims forms and ripping them up to ensure that no one sees. Once, she forgets, fills in an entire sheet with his name, address and telephone number and posts it as internal mail, so that two days later he starts getting calls about his non-existent insurance claim and she has to speak to customer services.

  ‘Clerical error,’ she tells them and imagines them seeing through to the inner mess of her, though in reality she is only asked not to make everyone’s job harder by being slipshod with her own.

  Coming home, she picks up supermarket wine and stupid canapés – prawn mousse on scallop shells, Jerusalem artichoke crisps. He usually cooks dinner but she likes to contribute something, to pass him something on a plate and watch him eat it. The journey home has been transformed, a surprisingly luxurious thing. On the Tube, her carrier bags bump against her ankles; the crush, the tinny overspill of other people’s music; yet all of this is now somehow part of a larger picture. Changing lines, an assault of elbows, doors closing on the edge of her sleeve; and yet anticipation like something worn about the shoulders, impervious to all discomfort.

  In her flat, the charm of his bare feet on her floorboards. Stooping to kiss her, holding his hands away from her sides.

  ‘Don’t touch me, Mag, I’m covered in garlic.’

  ‘I wasn’t going to touch you. Why would I touch you? I don’t know where you’ve been.’

  She kisses him again like that, holding her hands away in mimicry; half-notion of a game for later. He quirks an eyebrow at her and she pulls away, pours two glasses of wine.

  He cooks because he is better at it. He understands which flavours go together, how to time things so that nothing burns. She clowns to cover her comparative uselessness, serves her pre-bought canapés with exaggerated flourish – blinis plated in concentric circles, dates split lengthways and piled with Shropshire Blue.

  ‘Imagine if I could actually cook,’ she says, offering up a devilled egg between pursed fingers. ‘What a catch I’d be.’

  ‘Triple threat,’ he agrees. ‘Singing, dancing, cordon bleu.’

  ‘Probably just as well I have a flaw,’ she nods, watching him edge a saucepan of something fragrant off the heat, the dark breadth of him beneath the strip light. ‘Makes me more human, don’t you think?’

  Over dinner, he tells her a story about an argument he had with a client, the owner of some twenty acres of parkland who wanted the centrepiece on a restored sculpture fountain done in an inferior granite rather than marble, to keep expenses down. Later, he scrubs his hands to rid them of the garlic and pulls her to him with his fingers still wet, hard at the tips and oddly gritty.

  +

  They had met at a birthday party for someone her friends had been hoping she would marry. A stupid sort of day, insincere with sunshine. She had sat on the patio steps and watched people she didn’t know eating mozzarella and beef tomatoes, bacon-wrapped chicken, sugar-dusted doughnuts and Comice pears. Thelonious Monk playing on someone’s speakers, ‘’Round Midnight’ at two o’clock in the afternoon.

  Her main impression of the person she had been dragged there to meet was that he was very loud and welcoming and she couldn’t wait for him to go away. He had shown her his collection of branded shot glasses from his trip around America and she had nodded and finished her drink too quickly, spilling, seethe of tonic water over her wrists.

  In the past, her friends had accused her of being picky. Rolled their eyes at her inability to overlook a bad shirt, asked gently if she thought she was so very perfect herself.

  ‘No sense wishing,’ they would say, weary when she found a man dull or difficult. ‘Maybe you’re better off without.’

&n
bsp; She would agree with them, of course – frank feminist, happy with her job and her hobbies, easy in her single skin. Privately, however, she knew herself better. Knew herself for what she was: a great failure at solitude. Sluicing through her twenties illuminated only by the glow of terrestrial television, finding much to her dismay at the age of twenty-nine that she longed to amuse and to be longed for. A faint life. Eating apricots and growing bony and forgetting how to talk to people. Loneliness like a taste on the skin.

  He had turned up late to the party, too tall in the patio doorway, bumping his head on the lintel. Gentle touch of his hand. A relief great enough to change the very music on the speakers: Thelonious Monk cycling through to ‘Werewolves of London’ by Warren Zevon. Whoever had made the playlist clearly hadn’t given much thought to the importance of segue.

  +

  Her flat came ready-furnished and the wallpaper is the colour of veal – overcooked and slightly sickly, the same colour which has seeped into the carpet and the curtains, the counterpane on the bed. In the mornings, his right thigh makes a clicking sound like the resettling of a bone in its socket. His groan, a painful satisfaction. Lifting his arms above his head to snap his shoulders into place.

  As a boy, so he tells her, his mother would insist that cracking his knuckles would lead to arthritis. Reading aloud to him from Mary Poppins, his mother would place particular emphasis on the character of Mrs Corry; the woman with the barley-sugar fingers who snapped them off for other people to eat.

  ‘There was a lesson in that for me somewhere,’ he reflects. ‘Though it mostly just made me bite my nails.’

  Clouded with morning, his body is a curious jigsaw. She takes his fingers and kisses them, mimes a bite to the tip of his thumb.